At the end of 2014, Facebook reported 1.39 billion monthly active users. In the meantime, 500 million tweets were sent each day on Twitter. Indeed, social networks have come to dominate aspects of our lives. ...

When people interact in an Internet community, they experience higher levels of trust initially. But as time passes and more information comes to light about other users, they are more wary, according to ...

Online word-of-mouth communications are having a significant effect on product sales, yet research to date has failed to understand why that effect fluctuates, according to a new study in the Journal of Marketing.

The photo-sharing app Snapchat is not yet as popular as Facebook for social networking, but the greater privacy Snapchat may offer could motivate users to share more intimate types of content for different ...

Fifteen years ago, the name "Aiden" was hardly on the radar of Americans with new babies. It ranked a lowly 324th on the Social Security Administration's list of popular baby names. But less than a decade ...

(Phys.org)—A pair of researchers based at New York University has found a second explanation for the long lifespan of naked mole rats—their social networks. In their paper published in The Royal Society Pr ...

People in a society are bound together by a set of connections - a social network. Cooperation between people in the network is essential for societies to prosper, and the question of what drives the emergence ...

Should one produce wheat or corn this year? When is the best time to put products on the market? In emerging countries in particular, producers are exposed to food price fluctuations. Can social networks ...

Social network service

A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

Social networking has encouraged new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people.

While it could be said that email and websites have most of the essential elements of social network services, the idea of proprietary encapsulated services has gained popular uptake recently.

The main types of social networking services are those which contain category divisions (such as former school-year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages) and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with Facebook widely used worldwide; MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America; Nexopia (mostly in Canada); Bebo, Hi5, StudiVZ (mostly in Germany), Decayenne, Tagged, XING;, Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe; Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America; and Friendster, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, Xiaonei and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands.

There have been some attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard and the Open Source Initiative), but this has led to some concerns about privacy.